OCTOBER 2019 15
Then one day at The Wittliff, I began
exploring his archive for a planned exhi-
bition. What I discovered blew my mind.
Dobie single-handedly integrated the
Texas Folklore Society in the 1920s—
with a woman. One of the young writers
he mentored, Jovita González, became
president of the Folklore Society in 1930.
This was an astonishing accomplishment
for a Mexican American woman in Texas
during those years.
It turns out Dobie opened doors for
many other accomplished people. In
1934, he invited J. Mason Brewer, an Afri-
can American, into the Folklore Society.
By the ’40s, Dobie was one of the most
prominent white Texans to champion
civil rights. He publicly called for inte-
grating the University of Texas, which led
in part to the university firing him.
I began to see that Dobie was also a
visionary environmentalist. He helpedroots, and bark were brewed into teas
or made into lotions to treat everything
from headaches and flesh wounds to colic
and dysentery. He told how Comanches
favored mesquite fires because they gave
off relatively little smoke, and he noted
that when a frontier Texan named Big
Foot Wallace “wanted to describe eyes
as being especially bright, he said they
‘glowed like mesquite coals.’”
Dobie had taken the commonplace
object behind my ordinary suburb and
injected it with life, with meaning. In
this and so many other ways, Dobie can
make the world around us come alive. He
makes us all paisanos.M
Y APPRECIATION FOR DOBIE
crystallized while working as a
curator at The Wittliff Collections, a
magnificent archival repository at Texas
State University devoted to the writers,photographers, and musicians of Texas
and the Southwest. Bill Wittliff, the
recently deceased author and photog-
rapher who adapted Larry McMurtry’s
novel Lonesome Dove for TV, founded
The Wittliff with a gift of Dobie’s papers
to the university.
Earlier, as a graduate student studying
Southwestern literature, I had learned a
bit about Dobie. I delighted in his famous
observation: “The average Ph.D. thesis is
nothing but a transference of bones from
one graveyard to another.” But beyond
that he didn’t come off very well.
I read devastating critiques of his writ-
ing by some of my literary heroes, includ-
ing McMurtry, who judged Dobie’s prose
to be “endlessly repetitious, thematically
empty, structureless, and carelessly writ-
ten.” Even worse, I heard him condemned
as a racist and saw him dismissed as a
sexist, though without much evidence.